Reflections on the transnational turn in United States history: Theory and practice

Journal of Global History

Volumn 4, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 453-474

  Tyrrell, Ian ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77149150652     PISSN: 17400228     EISSN: 17400236     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S1740022809990167     Document Type: Review

References (150)

1. 'AHR forum: entangled empires in the Atlantic World', American Historical Review, 112, 3, 2007, 'Introduction', pp. 710-11
2. Eliga H. Gould, 'Entangled histories, entangled worlds: the English-speaking Atlantic as a Spanish periphery', American Historical Review, 112, 3, 2007, pp. 764-86
3. 'AHR conversation: on transnational history', with C. A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed, American Historical Review, 111, 5, 2006, pp. 1440-64
4. Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, 'Beyond comparison: histoire croisée and the challenge of reflexivity', History and Theory, 45, 1, 2006, pp. 30-50
5. Deborah Cohen and Maura O'Connor, 'Comparative history, cross-national history, transnational history: definitions', in Deborah Cohen and Maura O'Connor, eds., Comparison and history, London: Routledge, 2004, pp. ix-xxiv
6. Kiran Klaus Patel, '"Transnations" among " transnations"? The debate on transnational history in the United States and Germany', Center for European Studies Working Paper Series, 159, 2008, http://www.ces.fas. harvard.edu/publications/docs/pdfs/CES-159.pdf (consulted 25 June 2009)
7. See, for example, Frank N. Pieke, Pál Nyíri, Mette Thunø, and Antonella Ceddagno, Transnational Chinese: Fujianese migrants in Europe, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004
8. Sucheng Chan, ed., The flow of people, resources, and ideas between China and America during the exclusion era, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006
9. Gregor Benton and E. T. Gomez, Chinese in Britain, 1800-2000: economy, transnationalism, identity, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007
10. Adam McKeown, Chinese migrant networks and cultural change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900-1936, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001
11. Erik van der Vleuten, 'Toward a transnational history of technology: meanings, promises, pitfalls', Technology and Culture, 49, 4, 2008, pp. 974-94
12. For a general view of diasporas studies, see Carol R. Ember, Melvin Ember, and Ian A. Skoggard, eds., Encyclopedia of diasporas: immigrant and refugee cultures around the world, New York and Boston, MA: Springer, 2004
13. Pierre-Yves Saunier, 'Learning by doing: notes about the making of the Palgrave dictionary of transnational history', Journal of Modern European History, 6, 2, 2008, pp. 159-80
14. Ian Tyrrell, 'American exceptionalism in an age of international history', American Historical Review, 96, 4, 1991, pp. 1031-55
15. Michael McGerr, 'The price of the "new transnational history"', American Historical Review, 96, 4, 1991, pp. 1056-67
16. For US history, see Ian Tyrrell, Historians in public: the practice of American history, 1890-1970, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005
17. David Thelen, 'Of audiences, borderlands, and comparisons: toward the internationalization of American history', Journal of American History, 79, 2, 1992, p. 433
18. Journal of American History, Ibid., p. 451
19. David Thelen, 'The nation and beyond: transnational perspectives on United States history', Journal of American History, 86, 3, 1999, pp. 965-75 (introduction to a special issue of the same name)
20. Thomas Bender, New York intellect: a history of intellectual life in New York City, from 1750 to the beginnings of our own time, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988
21. Randolph Bourne, 'Trans-national America', Atlantic Monthly, 118, July 1916, pp. 86-97
22. Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American history in a global age, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002
23. 'Internationalizing the study of American history: a joint project of the Organization of American Historians and New York University: report on planning conference, Villa La Pietra, New York University in Florence, Italy July 6-9, 1997', http://www.oah.org/activities/lapietra/report1.html (consulted 25 June 2009)
24. Tyrrell, 'American exceptionalism', pp. 1031-55
25. Raymond Grew, 'The comparative weakness of American history', Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 16, 1, 1985, pp. 87-101
26. George M. Fredrickson, 'From exceptionalism to variability: recent developments in cross-national comparative history', Journal of American History, 82, 2, 1995, p. 590
27. 'Internationalizing the study of American history: a joint project of the Organization of American Historians and New York University. report on conference III, Villa La Pietra, New York University in Florence, Italy, July 5-8, 1999', http://www.oah.org/activities/lapietra/report3.html (consulted 25 June 2009)
28. Micol Seigel, 'Beyond compare: comparative method after the transnational turn', Radical History Review, 91, Winter 2005, pp. 63, 78 (first quote)
29. Jürgen Kocka, 'Comparison and beyond', History and Theory, 42, 1, 2003, pp. 39-44
30. Ian Tyrrell, Woman's world/woman's empire: the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in international perspective, 1880-1930, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991
31. Ian Tyrrell, True gardens of the gods: Californian-Australian environmental reform, 1860-1930, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999
32. Marc Bloch, 'A contribution towards a comparative history of European societies', in Land and work in mediaeval Europe: selected papers by Marc Bloch, trans. J. E. Anderson, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967, p. 47
33. Michael Kazin, 'The vogue of transnational history', Raritan, 26, 3, 2007, p. 167
34. William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Peer Vries, 'Editorial', Journal of Global History, 1, 1, 2006, p. 2
35. Thomas Bender, The La Pietra report: a report to the profession, http://www.oah.org/activities/lapietra/ index.html (consulted 12 July 2008)
36. For a parallel criticism of globalization, see Frederick Cooper, 'What is the concept of globalization good for? An African historian's perspective', African Affairs, 100, 2001, pp. 189-213
37. Akira Iriye, 'The internationalization of history', American Historical Review, 94, 1, 1989, pp. 1-10
38. For example, see Kristin Hoganson, Consumers' imperium: the global production of American domesticity, 1865-1920, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007
39. Erez Manela, The Wilsonian moment: self-determination and the international origins of anticolonial nationalism, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 222-5
40. Gould, 'Entangled histories', p. 786
41. Werner and Zimmermann, 'Beyond comparison', pp. 30-50
42. 'AHR forum: entangled empires'
43. For borderland studies, see Samuel Truett and E. Young, eds., Continental crossroads: remapping U.S.-Mexico borderlands history, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004
44. For a critique of transnational history and the promotion of a 'trans-border' alternative, see Joseph E. Taylor III, 'Boundary terminology', Environmental History, 13, 3, 2008, pp. 454-81
45. Konrad H. Jarausch, 'Reflections on transnational history', 2006, in http://www.h-net.org/german/ discuss/Trans/forum-trans-index.htm (consulted 4 June 2008)
46. 'Internationalizing the study of American history: a joint project of the Organization of American Historians and New York University: report on conference II', http://www.oah.org/activities/lapietra/ report2.html (consulted 1 September 2008)
47. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, 'Connected histories: notes toward a reconfiguration of early modern Eurasia', Modern Asian Studies, 31, 3, 1997, pp. 735-62
48. Jarausch, 'Reflections'
49. Ian Tyrrell, 'Making nations/making states: American historians in the context of empire', Journal of American History, 86, 3, 1999, pp. 1015-44
50. Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad, and Oliver Janz, Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006
51. Patel, '"Transnations" among "transnations"?', passim
52. Lawrence Veysey, 'The autonomy of American history reconsidered', American Quarterly, 31, 4, 1979, pp. 455-77
53. Carl N. Degler, 'Remaking American history', Journal of American History, 67, 1, 1980, p. 16
54. Edward J. Davies II, The United States in world history, New York: Routledge, 2006
55. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006
56. Paul Sutter, Driven wild: how the fight against automobiles launched the modern wilderness movement, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2002, pp. 96, 318
57. Richard White, 'The nationalization of nature', Journal of American History, 86, 3, 1999, pp. 1015-44
58. Alan Dawley, 'Preface', Class and community: the industrial revolution in Lynn, 25th anniversary edition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000, p. xxv
59. see also Andrew Gyory, Closing the gate: race, politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998
60. Moon-Hu Jung, Coolies and cane: race, labor, and sugar in the age of emancipation, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006
61. Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for coal: America's deadliest labor war, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008, p. 291
62. Peter J. Coleman, Progressivism and the world of reform: New Zealand and the origins of the American welfare state, Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas, 1987
63. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic crossings: social politics in a progressive age, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998
64. Ian Tyrrell, 'Transatlantic progressivism in women's temperance and suffrage', in David Gutzke, ed., Britain and transnational progressivism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 134-48
65. Gutzke, Britain and transnational progressivism
66. Coleman, Progressivism
67. Ian Tyrrell, 'Looking eastward: Pacific and global perspectives on American history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries', Japanese Journal of American Studies, 18, 2007, pp. 41-57
68. For environmental history, the seminal text in regard to reciprocity is Alfred W. Crosby Jr, The Columbian exchange: biological and cultural consequences of 1492, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972
69. Examples include Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible empire: America's advance through twentieth-century Europe, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005
70. R. Laurence Moore and Maurizio Vaudagna, eds., The American century in Europe, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003
71. Philip Bell and Roger Bell, eds., Americanization and Australia, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1998
72. Rob Kroes and Robert Rydell, Buffalo Bill in Bologna, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005
73. Patricia Grimshaw, Paths of duty: American missionary wives in nineteenth-century Hawaii, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989
74. Mary Brown Bullock, An American transplant: the Rockefeller Foundation and Peking Union Medical College, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982
75. On 'Williams School' foreign policy studies of this type, see Paul M. Buhle and Edward Rice-Maximin, William Appleman Williams: the tragedy of empire, New York: Routledge, 1995
76. William Appleman Williams, Empire as a way of life, New York: Oxford University Press, 1980
77. See also Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American dream: American economic and cultural expansion, 1890-1945, New York: Hill and Wang, 1982
78. Ian Tyrrell, Transnational nation: United States history in global perspective since 1789, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, ch. 14
79. Eileen P. Scully, Bargaining with the state from afar: American citizenship in treaty port China, 1844-1942, New York: Columbia University Press, 2001
80. for American expatriates, there is no satisfactory single study, but see Maureen Montgomery, 'Gilded prostitution': money, migration and marriage, 1870-1914, London: Routledge, 1989
81. Mira Wilkins, The emergence of multinational enterprise: American business abroad from the colonial era to 1914, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970
82. Sven Beckert, 'Emancipation and empire: reconstructing the worldwide web of cotton production in the age of the American Civil War', American Historical Review, 109, 5, 2004, pp. 1405-38
83. See also Peter A. Coclanis, 'Distant thunder: the creation of a world market in rice and the transformations it wrought', American Historical Review, 98, 4, 1993, pp. 1050-78
84. For a synthesis, see Richard Tucker, Insatiable appetite: the United States and the ecological degradation of the tropical world, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000
85. Samuel Truett, Fugitive landscapes: the forgotten history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006, p. 56
86. Walter LaFeber, 'The United States and Europe in an age of American unilateralism', in Moore and Vaudagna, American Century, pp. 26, 45 (quote)
87. for an example of the United States as global space, see Walter LaFeber, Michael Jordan and the new global capitalism, New York: W. W. Norton, 1999
88. See the essays in Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Haunted by empire: geographies of intimacy in North American history, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006
89. Ann Laura Stoler and Frederic Cooper, 'Between metropole and colony: rethinking a research agenda', in Ann Laura Stoler and Frederic Cooper, eds., Tensions of empire: colonial cultures in a bourgeois world, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997, p. 15
90. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, eds., Cultures of U. S. imperialism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993
91. Amy Kaplan, The anarchy of empire in the making of U.S. culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002
92. Paul A. Kramer, The blood of government: race, empire, the United States, and the Philippines, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006
93. Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti: military occupation and the culture of U.S. imperialism, 1915-1940, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001
94. Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco Scarano, eds., Colonial crucible: empire in the making of the modern American state, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009
95. Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond borders: advocacy networks in international politics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998
96. Richard Price, 'Transnational civil society and advocacy in world politics', World Politics, 55, 4, 2003, pp. 579-606
97. Sidney Tarrow, The new transnational activism, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005
98. Manuel Castells, The rise of the network society, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996
99. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the global colour line: white men's countries and the international challenge of racial equality, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008
100. Robert A. Huttenback, Racism and empire: white settlers and colored immigrants in the British self-governing colonies, 1830-1910, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976
101. Charles Maier, 'Discussion on transnational history', 2006, http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl? trx=vx&list=h-german&month= 0601&week=d&msg=fz4or79bUjZXO9rM/LT0ZQ&user=&pw (consulted 30 June 2008)
102. Daniel R. Headrick, The invisible weapon: telecommunications and international politics, 1851-1945, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991
103. Headrick, The tools of empire: technology and European imperialism in the nineteenth century, New York: Oxford University Press, 1981
104. Tyrrell, Transnational nation, ch. 10
105. see the important but neglected work, Merle Curti, American philanthropy abroad, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963
106. cf. Richard Hofstadter, 'Cuba, the Philippines, and manifest destiny', in The paranoid style in American politics and other essays, New York: Knopf, 1965, pp. 145-87
107. Manela, Wilsonian moment
108. Paul Gordon Lauren, The evolution of international human rights: visions seen, 2nd edition, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003
109. Major American work has focused on abolitionism, for which see, for example, David Brion Davis, Slavery and human progress, New York: Oxford University Press, 1984
110. Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the world: America's vision for human rights, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005, focuses on the export of an American idea
111. Martha Hodes, The sea captain's wife: a true story of love, race, and war in the nineteenth century, New York: W. W. Norton, 2006
112. For example, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The many-headed hydra: the hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic, Boston, MA: Beacon, 2000
113. Madeleine Herren, 'Governmental internationalism and the beginning of a new world order in the late nineteenth century', in Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann, eds., The mechanics of internationalism: culture, society, and politics from the 1840s to the first world war, London and Oxford: German Historical Institute and Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 121-44
114. Clare Corbould, Becoming African Americans: black public life in Harlem, 1919-1939, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009, pp. 161-2, 209-13
115. Tyrrell, Woman's world, chs. 4-6
116. Leila Rupp, Worlds of women: the making of an international women's movement, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997
117. on public space, see Jürgen Habermas, The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society, trans. Thomas Burger (1962), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991
118. Thomas Faist, The volume and dynamics of international migration and transnational social spaces, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000
119. Ryan Dunch, 'Beyond cultural imperialism: cultural theory, Christian missions, and global modernity', History and Theory, 41, 3, 2002, p. 320
120. Mary and Margaret Leitch, Seven years in Ceylon: stories of mission life, New York: American Tract Society, 1890
121. American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Papers, Ibid., Margaret W. Leitch to N. G. Clark, 3 April 1882
122. Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann, 'Introduction: the mechanics of internationalism', in Geyer and Paulmann, Mechanics, pp. 22-3
123. Mechanics, Ibid.
124. Herren, 'Governmental internationalism', pp. 121-44
125. 'A3 The real fiction of unreal equality: networking the international system', University of Heidelberg Research Clusters, 2009, http://www.asia- europe. uni-heidelberg.de/research/areas/a/projects (consulted 16 April 2009)
126. On 'humanitarianism', see Gil Gott, 'Imperial humanitarianism: history of an arrested dialectic', in Berta Esperanza Hernandez-Truyol, ed., Moral imperialism: a critical anthology, New York: New York University Press, 2002, pp. 19-39
127. Curti, American philanthropy
128. Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's ghost: a story of greed, terror, and heroism in colonial Africa, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998
129. Lauren, Evolution, ch. 2
130. For a general view of diaspora studies, see Ember, Ember, and Skoggard, eds., Encyclopedia of diasporas
131. For much earlier studies, see Harold Marraro, 'Garibaldi in New York', New York History, 27, April 1946, pp. 182-4
132. Lawrence J. McCaffrey, ed., Irish nationalism and the American contribution, New York: Arno Press, 1976
133. For a recent study, see Michael Doorley, Irish-American diaspora nationalism: the Friends of Irish Freedom, 1916-1935, Portland, OR: Four Courts, 2005
134. Among US historians, Donna Gabaccia has led the way in developing transnational interpretation of Italian diasporas: see, for example, Gabaccia, Italy's many diasporas, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2000
135. Corbould, Becoming African Americans, pp. 161-2, 209-13. Among numerous other works
136. see Irma Watkins Owens, Blood relations: Caribbean immigrants and the Harlem community, 1900-1930, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996
137. Kevin Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: black expatriates in the civil rights era, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006, pp. 29, 45
138. Winston James, Holding aloft the banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean radicalism in early twentieth-century America, London: Verso, 1998
139. Judith Stein, The world of Marcus Garvey: race and class in modern society, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1986
140. Pierre-Yves Saunier profile, 2007, http://www.h-net.org/people/editors/ show.cgi?ID=124605 (consulted 24 September 2008)
141. Pierre-Yves Saunier and Shane Ewen, eds., Another global city: historical explorations into the transnational municipal moment, 1850-2000, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008
142. Saunier, 'Learning by doing', pp. 173-4
143. see also Maier, 'Discussion.'
144. White, 'Nationalization of nature'
145. Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier, eds., The Palgrave Dictionary of transnational history, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
146. See, for example, Mary Beth Norton et al., A people and a nation, 7th edition, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2005
147. Alan W. Brinkley, American history: a survey, 11th edition, Boston, MA: McGraw Hill, 2003
148. Thomas Bender, A nation among nations: America's place in world history, New York: Hill and Wang, 2006
149. Eric Rauchway, Blessed among nations: how the world made America, New York: Hill and Wang, 2006
150. For a more balanced view that emphasizes comparisons as well as transnational aspects, see Carl J. Guarneri, America in the world: United States history in global context, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007